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He bends over the bench in profile with a beard and fur at his collar. No likeness of Gutenberg from life survives. Every portrait of him goes back to one engraving from 1584, 116 years after he died.

Every book in Europe is a year of someone’s life. A Bible means a scriptorium, a team of copyists, months of candlelight, and a price that only princes and cathedrals can pay. Johannes Gutenberg, goldsmith, debtor, keeper of secrets, has spent 20 years and three fortunes on another way. The fortunes are documented in lawsuits. In Strasbourg he manufactured pilgrim mirrors, little polished badges meant to catch holy radiance at the great Aachen pilgrimage. He was ruined when plague put the pilgrimage off by a year. His partners sued to learn the other, secret art he kept hinting at. He never told them. He came home to Mainz and borrowed 800 guilders from Johann Fust, a money-lender who understood collateral better than wonder, and 800 more when that ran out. The secret is not one invention but a stack of them. A steel punch, carved with a single letter, struck into soft copper to make a mold. A hand-held caster that turns molten metal into a finished letter in seconds. An alloy, mostly lead with tin and antimony, whose exact recipe he will not name. It shrinks so little that it casts a crisp face every time. His Bible font runs to some 290 distinct characters, because a machine must not look like a machine. He cast the ligatures and abbreviations a scribe’s hand would make, so the page would pass for the work of a very good monastery. Scribes’ ink beads up on metal, so he cooked a new one from lampblack and linseed oil, closer to varnish than to ink. The press itself he adapted from the ones that crush grapes; Mainz sits in wine country, and he borrowed accordingly. Today a sheet comes off the bed carrying 42 lines of scripture in two columns, the ink dense and even, every letter as sharp as its thousand brothers. A scribe would need three days for this page. The press made it while a man held his breath. Word travels ahead of the finished book. At the Frankfurt fair, a churchman named Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini, who will die as Pope Pius II, examines sample quires, folded gatherings of the printed pages. He writes to a cardinal that the script is clean enough to read without spectacles, and that every copy is already spoken for. The full run is about 180 Bibles, most on Italian paper, the rest on vellum. A single vellum copy costs the skins of about 170 calves. Buyers pay a fraction of a handwritten Bible’s price and receive something no prince has ever owned: a perfect twin of every other copy. Gutenberg is not among the winners. In November 1455, with the Bibles barely dry, Fust calls in the debt before a notary and takes the workshop, the type, and the finished stock. He reopens the business with Peter Schöffer, Gutenberg’s best apprentice, who soon marries Fust’s daughter. The inventor lives 13 more years, pensioned at the end by the archbishop with an allowance of grain, wine, and a court suit of clothes. He dies in the city where he started, owning almost nothing he made. About 49 of his Bibles survive, each worth more than the building that houses it. The page does not care. The page is already everywhere.